History offers lessons on nuclear brinkmanship

Operation Castle, American series of high-energy nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll (in the Northwest of the Marshall Islands), March 26, 1954. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Operation Castle, American series of high-energy nuclear tests at...

Events this week between North Korea and the United States aren't the first time that two nuclear powers ratcheted up rhetoric in a way that made the rest of the world nervous.

The most famous of those incidents came in October of 1962 when the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S. teetered on the edge of becoming a full-scale nuclear conflict. The "Cuban Missile Crisis" involved a showdown between the nations over missiles in Cuba and involved a naval blockade around the island.

Express Newsletters

Get the latest news, sports and food features sent directly to your inbox.

Eventually the two superpowers agreed to a plan in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapons in Cuba, the United States would make similar removals in Turkey and Italy and agree to not invade Cuba.

Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy expressed her husband's thoughts about the threat of war in a letter to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.

While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint — little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight.

As the American public once again wonders about the threat of nuclear attack, and the rest of the world watches the White House and Pyongyang, Kennedy's letter offers a glimpse back to another time the world seemed on the brink.

You can read the letter in full at the State Department's Office of the Historian website here.